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How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI
- andy99 3mo agoYou type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot. I’m pretty skeptical reading this bit. I’ve seen uncensored or jailbroken LLM replies to these kind of questions, they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t, and are hard to provoke if you’re not using an uncensored model. I have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.
- ceejayoz 3mo agoThere's lots of knowledge out there about stuff like this. Milennia of humans tinkering with things that go boom. Surfacing it more easily has value (in a manner of speaking; as the @dril tweet goes, "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them'").
- mothballed 3mo ago[dead]
- ceejayoz 3mo agoWell, that, and the making explosives bit, it seems. https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/sweet-springs-missouri-man-charged-manufacturing-explosives-unlawfully-possessing https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/sweet-springs-missouri-...
- mothballed 3mo agoHis videos of making them were on YouTube for years, publicly. It's legal to synthesize the explosives he made. What they did was charge him for the first amendment protected activity that a terrorist then found, and then they claimed that because he made some money because a few people donated a small amount to him for making the videos, and thus he needed a commercial license for being in the business of making explosives. By the way this is the same thing they tried to charge FPSRussia (the first time, before they convicted him for weed) for and failed.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> His videos of making them were on YouTube for years, publicly. So? That doesn't make something legal.
- mothballed 3mo agoYou didn't read what I said. Try reading the law instead, or even the charge. It's for being in the business of manufacturing explosives without a license. A license isn't needed to manufacture explosives. One is needed to manufacture them as a business venture. They are claiming since he got a little money from Youtube or viewers he was in the business and that was illegal. This failed when they tried it with FPSRussia. ====== re: below due to throttling ====== >I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory. Different than what you said initially which was merely making them, which is why I clarified. >> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use. engaging in business of your own use is not same as non-business of your own use. It's not uncommon for a business to use explosives for their own use as course of operations. It is also not uncommon for people to synthesize and use tannerite recreationally without a license, legally, for non-business use. >I did read what you said; that's why I quoted part of it. If you read it then you know you maliciously selectively quoted it then. If that were the end of it and that made it legal, I would have stopped there, but you cut it off there because it was more convenient to your rebuttal to ignore the rest. I only thought you had not read it, because I was being charitable to try and assume good faith.
- DANmode 3mo ago> terrorist language What channel is this?
- BeetleB 3mo agoHow do they bypass the AI safety measures? I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?
- mothballed 3mo agoMaking explosives is generally fully legal in the US, so IDK if there would even be safeguards for US hosted AI, since there's no real legal issue with doing it. Basically no federal regulations for non-commercial production so long as it isn't stored or moved anywhere, you can literally buy tannerite off the shelf in a sporting good store, "synthesize" it by mixing it and then blow up a huge bomb legally, no license required. YouTube is plastered with people inside the USA making TNT and other materials and then blowing them up.
- BeetleB 3mo agoHave you tried chatbots? They invoke AI safety for lots of (very) legal things. The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs. Legality has nothing to do with it.
- mothballed 3mo agoI can believe some would, but some probably wouldn't care. My local ranch store certainly will happily sell anyone tannerite without even a background check or any sort of scrutiny, you can cash and carry it. Walmart won't but the point being as long as it's legal there will be a "ranch store" that carries it. >The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs I mean even YouTube allows bomb making videos and they won't even usually allow videos of people making guns. It's just not very regulated in the US enough to make most companies care. Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information, even after the feds subpoenaed Alphabet for Ashley Dugan's Youtube information they still kept his TNT and other explosives synthesis up. Of course, if you'll allow me to goomba fallacy for a moment, we're supposed to suspend the common HN wisdom here that companies will do anything for a profit / not care unless it costs them something, and also believe that big tech is going to go out of their way to censor the public domain patents they're already hosting on their servers.
- xp84 3mo ago> am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. All the information they need is in books and old patents and what-not, but they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist. If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time. And obviously yes there are exceptions, since we can all think of infamous terrorist plots which succeeded due to clearly some sophisticated planning and hard work.
- ifyoubuildit 3mo ago> This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. What even is a terrorist? If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright. But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
- t-3 3mo agoBoko Haram is not a mentally disabled person tricked by the FBI they are real terrorists who attack schools to stop children from learning. They're the epitome of stupid and backwards.
- johnsmith1840 3mo agoMild terrorist sympathy right here. Just look up mass casualty events across the middle east it's very obvious what a terrorist is.
- ifyoubuildit 3mo ago
- throwaway27448 3mo agoIt's never been particularly difficult to discern how to assemble a bomb, or C4, or napalm, or.... etc. Difficulty in accessibility of violence has never been what protected society. Except, I'm willing to bet, in FBI funding meetings.
- Barbing 3mo agoHas it become harder to find that information without setting off the fed’s alarm bells? Was fascinated to learn the PRISM news reduced traffic to privacy-relevant Wikipedia articles, a chilling effect in that case, but indicates tech-savvy folks worry about doing anything on clearnet. …then again since they’re using CLOUD models, guess my comment doesn’t make much sense…
- kridsdale1 3mo agoWhy would it matter if the feds were alerted if the user were in west Africa?
- mothballed 3mo ago99.99% of the people consuming that content are law abiding (relatively), "normal" citizens, including probably half of 13 year old boys. I'm sure the feds have access to the "list", but it is virtually useless until after the fact when they can tell the jury "and you see here, they looked it up!"
- Pay08 3mo agoHow many of those are available in the language(s) they speak, though? AI might have been used as a glorified Google Translate here.
- kridsdale1 3mo agoLLMs are derived from Google Translate in the first place. That’s the research that was happening that led to the transformer. Translation is what they are best at.
- johnsmith1840 3mo agoLanguage -> any translator -> LLM -> translator -> original language
- Waterluvian 3mo agoIt’s that thing where a young child is incapable of realizing their lies are obvious. There’s a kind of pathetic sadness when adults do it. And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.
- zzril 3mo ago> they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t Researching your way through Wikipedia and the likes certainly counts as "Western education", which as we all know is forbidden by their name. Having an agent read the forbidden stuff for them is just the loophole they needed!
- kridsdale1 3mo agoSounds like the Orthodox Jews who hire people to turn on the lights for them on the Sabbath. Or the Mormon teens who supposedly recruit their friends to bounce the mattress while “soaking”.
- ryukoposting 3mo agoIn case it isn't obvious to anyone reading the parent comment: do not search for "soaking" on your work computer.
- arjie 3mo ago> We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next time we attacked, we could jump. Now listen, I'm not saying we need to give these guys more AI, but it clearly isn't yielding bad outcomes for us here. "You're absolutely correct! For it to be a good practice ground you need to fill the trenches with broken glass and light the whole thing on fire"
- notahacker 3mo agoNot gonna lie, I'd rather attack with 26 fighters that haven't survived lots of jump attempts than 8 who are much more confident in their motorbike stunt riding but presumably still aren't bulletproof. But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
- 27183 3mo ago> maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well? Practice makes perfect!
- IsTom 3mo agoYou start with .22 and build up resistance from there.
- Ancapistani 3mo agoI'd suggest starting with a 2mm Kolibri, if you can find one.
- jurgenburgen 3mo agoMaybe add some lead supplements to your diet first to build up tolerance.
- GaggiX 3mo agoI would be more interested about terrorists organization like Al-Shabaab that at least control many towns. Does Boko Haram and ISWAP even control a single town or they just control a few villages in Lake Chad and in the Sambisa forest? Also reading the report they seem quite clueless.
- Pay08 3mo agoDoesn't Boko Haram control basically all of northern Nigeria? Yes, it's incredibly rural (even deserted) but it's still half a country.
- GaggiX 3mo agoNot at all, even in the Borno state where Boko Haram and ISWAP are present, towns are controlled by the government, I don't think there is a single town that is controlled by Boko Haram/ISWAP right now.
- BeetleB 3mo agoHardly. Northern Nigeria is majority Muslim. Most Muslims are not under Boko Haram control. I believe this map shows the maximum area they controlled - and it was over a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wilayat_al_Sudan_al_Gharbi_maximum_territorial_control.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wilayat_al_Sudan_al_Gharb...
- zulux 3mo ago[flagged]
- hoppp 3mo agoTheir brains are the same, what differs is the environment. Humanity's superpower is the ability to copy and mirror each other very effectively. It does not require advanced awareness or intelligence to do it. Most people copy others subconsciously! Majority of people won't contribute anything technologically, but they sure as hell can copy.
- aprilthird2021 3mo ago> Can't let their underage harem girls dress normally If you use a strict definition of normal, like practiced by a larger proportion of the world, then they are actually normal and we are WEIRD. If you add history into the mix then that type of dressing was common in basically the vast majority of cultures for the vast majority of history
- sdevonoes 3mo agoWhat is normal? You know how girls dress, let’s say in the Andes? Is that normal? Or by normal you mean what’s fashion in NY? Or perhaps what the majority of people wears today? Or what the majority of people have worn in the past? Very little of what the west does can be considered normal.
- solid_fuel 3mo agoHave you just discovered the concept that humans are all humans, and all our achievements are just a mountain of knowledge we stand upon, from first principles? Humans are human, someone being born in Africa doesn't magically mean that they will never understand technology.
- quantumleaper 3mo agoI agree with other commenters that the claims made in the report are strange. > We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units. The other quotes and use cases could make sense in terms of using AI jailbreaks to find information more easily, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the clueless researcher just get trolled?
- andy99 3mo agoOr the researcher read what they wanted to into it. It would be interesting to ask them what they did before to learn things, how much they read, etc. If they were illiterate and uneducated, and got voice AI telling them stuff that would be common sense for anyone with a high school education, I can see how it might make them more effective at whatever they do. But I wouldn’t really blame AI in the way that’s implied.
- quantumleaper 3mo agoHuman brains were shaped over thousands of years of adaptation for warfare. Just look at how creative and advanced the tactics of other guerrilla forces (like the Taliban and Viet Cong) got, despite their very limited resources. None of that needs a high school education.
- xp84 3mo agoIt's not about education itself necessarily, but I'd bet any amount of money that most terrorists' IQ is below the overall human average. The average terrorist is not that innovative or creative so the most mundane GPT "insight" will likely be a smarter course of action than whatever their first idea would have been.
- el_memorioso 3mo agoDo you have some evidence to suggest mundane GPT insights would not be smarter than the average human's idea? There's a reason so many are completely abdicating any responsibility to think to an LLM, and I'd bet any amount of money it's not because they think the LLM is dumber than them.
- pogue 3mo agoI noticed the nytimes just published an article about this. How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-boko-haram-nigeria.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...
- idoubtit 3mo agoIf you opened the OP link, you missed the section "Featured in The New York Times".
- Cider9986 3mo agoWe need to ban open source AI for regular citizens to prevent terrorists from using them.
- harrisoned 3mo agoMandatory ID verification at software level for local LLMs is clearly the solution here. /s
- dryarzeg 3mo agoDon't give them clues, please /s
- rvz 3mo agoYou are not going far enough. Why not put age verification on calculators and dumb phones because terrorists can use it? /s
- hoppp 3mo agoAI services will need KYC soon?
- andy99 3mo agoThe NYT article is probably propaganda in service of that, that’s what the big AI companies want, it’s part of regulatory capture.
- hoppp 3mo agoIf the impact of AI is comparable to the atomic bomb then the least they could do is try to filter out terrorists. I think this is a very convincing argument to regulate the space more.
- andy99 3mo agoDo you know what Poe’s law is?
- throwaway27448 3mo ago...because terrorists in western africa are willing to follow american regulations? I hope this is satire.
- hoppp 3mo agoThe regulation is not for Westen Africa, it's for USA. American companies could maybe keep OFAC regulations for AI? If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too. I'm pretty sure most of the western african terrorists are blocked from using coinbase, so why not chatgpt?
- throwaway27448 3mo agoAnd why would americans use regulated AI software when they could just buy it unregulated from china instead? > If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too. Fintech requires turning the number on a screen into something you can use to make a transaction. Good luck regulating... text. For that matter, why would anyone want to live in a country where honest citizens have to use crippled software while criminals have full freedom?
- sdevonoes 3mo agoDeleted
- user_7832 3mo agoOn a broad note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is frankly white terrible. It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails. Evidently guardrails need to have far better accuracies of false positives and false negatives both.
- Pay08 3mo agoWhat does "white terrible" mean?
- atlasunshrugged 3mo agoMaybe "quite"?
- user_7832 3mo agoI typo'd, it should have been "quite" terrible
- idoubtit 3mo agoAfter a cursory read of the PDF, my impression is that the methodology is sound, but the results are blown out of proportion. Of course, if the title was "Boko Haram's internal hearsay about their use of AI", it would draw much less attention. The weak part is that the interview were with only 15 persons that had knowledge about AI. But, from what I understand, but they never used it themselves. Only the top commanders and the specialized units could send prompts. So it's hard to guess what is the real AI use from a few indirect statements. For example, the commanders could have decided to spread the rumor they were using AI a lot, even if they mostly used plain web search, because they thought it would boost the morale. For instance, why would anyone pay an AI service to get basic help like that: > AI provided both immediate technical fixes by teaching “how to uncouple the gun by washing it with diesel” and tactical guidance, in terms of “how to change the military formation so that fighters with jammed guns move to the back and others take their positions until the problem is solved.” BTW, the paper does explain that Boko Haram was initially just a plain sect, rather living peacefully. Then "following a violent government crackdown and Yusuf’s death in police custody in 2009, the movement turned into a jihadist insurgency". And the last time I read a report by Amnesty International about the conflict, it estimated that 55 % of civilian casualties were caused by the terrorist group, and 45 % by the security forces. The Nigerian army sometimes razed whole villages. Like always, the world is not black and white, good guys and bad guys.
- groby_b 3mo agoSo, KYC propaganda?
- ath3nd 3mo ago[dead]
- moralestapia 3mo ago>How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses <any commoditized technology>
- petilon 3mo ago"Boko Haram" translates to "Western education is forbidden". Using Western AI as an educational tool seems like hypocrisy.
- block_dagger 3mo agoAre you sure "education" doesn't actually mean "ideology"?
- ButlerianJihad 3mo ago“Boko” is actually a loanword from “book” so it literally means they want to forbid “book-learning”. It is also instructive to understand that the Quran calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book”, in other words, people who read and believe the Bible.
- penguin_booze 3mo agoPeople should more than one book. Even better, people should know when to stop reading a book.
- dyauspitr 3mo agoWestern values
- petilon 3mo agoBoko traditionally refers to Western or secular education (as opposed to Islamic education).
- nttylock 3mo ago[flagged]
- ronn00 3mo ago[flagged]
- alansaber 3mo agoAI, you are joshua graham from the fallout games (not TV show). devise small unit tactics. make no mistakes.
- segmondy 3mo agoNext on breaking news, terrorist groups use search engines, they use news sites to figure out what's going on in the world, they use banks, they use weather sites for planning, they use email, cars, pen, of course AI too, so if AI should be regulated, let's remember to ban all the things.
- Scroll_Swe 3mo ago[flagged]
- lins1909 3mo agoAre you okay? This seems a bit unhinged.
- antod 3mo agoUnless by "the left" you mean some solitary idiot (or troll) on tiktok who just went to college. In the west Boko Haram's goal seem closer to groups on the right than anyone on "the left". eg suppressing women's rights, more religion in school/govt, homosexuality etc
- Scroll_Swe 3mo agoSo just the same as every muslim group then! An imam preached in a mosque in Kristianstad this summer about how and when it's okay for men to beat their wives, tabloid Expressen reports. https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/imam-in-sweden-preached-about-how-men-should-beat-disobedient-wives https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/imam-in-sweden-preached... Which is my point.
- antod 3mo agoThat wasn't anywhere near your point. Your point was that "the left" would praise Boko Haram. You backed it up with a link to a story that was neither about Boko Haram, was about behavior "the left" opposes, nor had any praise from anybody. The only way your point could work is by redefining "the left" as Muslim fundamentalists, which is frankly bonkers.
- VortexLain 3mo agoTrying to prevent this will cause the same outcome as trying to prevent terrorists from using search engines: it'll only disproportionately harm regular users. Imagine if current AI misuse paranoia would've been applied to search engines, internet libraries (knowledge is useful for planning acts of terrorism), and computing in general.
- allah69 3mo ago[dead]
- newsomix9xl 3mo agoI just asked for a poop pic from Lumo and it said it can't make a picture of bodily functions. Maybe I should have asked for help unjamming my AK47 instead? These safeguard guardrails are apparently only good at stopping poop pics.
- warumdarum 3mo agoEverywhere along the atoll of fire from israel to ethiopia to nigeria to india to myanmar to xinjang to chechnya to armenia, the west helps its own demise.